A Dweller in Mesopotamia: Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden

By Donald Maxwell

"A Dweller in Mesopotamia" by Donald Maxwell. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Good Press
• Release date: Dec 2, 2019
• ISBN: 4057664600295

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Donald Maxwell

A Dweller in Mesopotamia

Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden

Published by Good Press, 2022

[e-mail]

EAN 4057664600295

Table of Contents

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

PREFACE

PLATES IN COLOUR AND MONOCHROME

LIST OF LINE SKETCHES

I

THE FIERY FURNACE

II

THE VENICE OF THE EAST.

III

SINBAD THE SOLDIER

IV

THE WISE MEN FROM THE WEST

V

BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON

VI

ARABIAN NIGHTS IN 1919

VII

IN OLD BAGHDAD

VIII

PARADISE LOST

IX

THE DESERT OF THE FLAMING SWORD

X

THE KINGS OF THE EAST

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Table of Contents

THE LAST CRUSADE

ADVENTURES WITH A

SKETCH BOOK

WITH BIBLE AND BRUSH

IN PALESTINE

[In preparation]

THE BODLEY HEAD

PREFACE

Table of Contents

Few adventurous incidents in our lives seem romantic at the time of their happening, and few places we visit are invested with that glamour that haunt them in recollection or anticipation. I remember comparing the colour scheme of a barge in Baghdad with that of one in Rochester. It was a comparison most unfavourable to Baghdad—a thing the colour of ashes with a thing of red and green and gold. Yet now that I am back in Rochester, the romance lingers around memories of dusty mahailas. It is easy to forget discomfort and insects and feel a certain glamour coming back to things which, at the time, represented the commonplaces of life. There certainly is a glamour about Mesopotamia. It is not so much the glamour of the present as of the past.

To have travelled in the land where Sennacherib held sway, to have walked upon the Sacred Way in Babylon, to have stood in the great banquet hall of Belshazzar's palace when the twilight is raising ghosts and when little imagination would be required to see the fingers of a man's hand come forth and write upon the plaster of the wall, to wander in the moonlight into narrow streets in Old Baghdad, with its recollections of the Arabian Nights: these things are to make enduring pictures in the Palace of Memory, that ideal collection where only the good ones are hung and all are on the line.

Although it was for the Imperial War Museum that I went to Mesopotamia, these notes are not about the War, but they are a series of impressions of Mesopotamia in general. The technical side of my work I have omitted, and any account of the campaign in this field I have left to other hands. The sketches here collected might be described as a bye-product of my mission in Mesopotamia; but most of them are the property of the Imperial War Museum, and it is by the courtesy of the Art Committee of that body that I have now been able to reproduce them.

The Beacon,

Borstal,

Rochester.

June 12, 1920.

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PLATES IN COLOUR AND MONOCHROME

Table of Contents

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LIST OF LINE SKETCHES

Table of Contents

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I

Table of Contents

THE FIERY FURNACE

Table of Contents

Abadan.

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Fig. 103

There is an unenviable competition between places situated in the region of Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf as to which can be the hottest. Abadan, the ever-growing oil port, which is in Persia and on the starboard hand as you go up the Shatt-el-Arab, if not actually the winner according to statistics, comes out top in popular estimation. Its proximity to the scorching desert, its choking dustiness and its depressing isolation, are characteristics which it shares with countless other places among these mud plains. But it can outdo them all with its bleached and slime-stained ground in which nothing can grow, its roaring furnaces and its all-pervading smell of hot oil.

Across the broad waters of the Shatt-el-Arab there stretches a lonely strip of country bounded by a wall of palm-tops. Like all the land here it is cultivated as long as it borders the river and thickly planted with date groves. Then lies a nondescript belt that just divides the desert from the sown, and then, a mile or so inland, scorched